This is CLOAK. This is our clothing brand. But more importantly, this is your clothing brand. — McLoughlin and Fischbach, CLOAK Mission Story

When Mark “Markiplier” Fischbach and Sean “Jacksepticeye” McLoughlin, two of the most prominent gaming YouTubers in the world at 22 and 20 million subscribers respectively, launched their CLOAK brand of athleisure wear for gamers, an interesting reaction sparked up from the ashes of its release. Selling the product line to the public as a long term dream of theirs, and the high-end brand was immediately snapped up, selling out of its pre-order run within a half a week. But its basic designs, dubious quality and bizarre “It’s for you but not for you” parasocial marketing mission has caused as much skepticism as it has success. Taking a deep dive into CLOAK and what it offers pre-launch, one meets the cults of personality around both men and sees what it is to milk YouTube in an age where sincerity creates cash.

The brand’s current claim to fame is simplicity: its spare, austere aesthetic, its sense of exclusivity and lightweight designs, which are apparently supposed to give gamers both an elite clothing cache and be practical and comfortable to wear. Markiplier says in the company’s mission statement video that he wants to create a subtle clothing line without huge branding… but CLOAK’s logo is plastered across the chest of its t-shirts like a billboard.

Nothing on the CLOAK website retails for under $20, and most items’ costs are set at thirty-five dollars or more. The beanies, that $20 item, at press time is the only item of clothing that’s sold out on the website. While shipping is inexpensive depending on how much you buy (as little as $6 for a beanie or as much as $9 for two hoodies), it’s double that for anyone outside of the contiguous United States. Compare this to brands such as The North Face and Adidas, two of CLOAK’s main competitors in the athleisure business: while they are comparative pricewise, the larger companies have two things that CLOAK does not—their clothing is made, per capita, out of a higher amount of cotton and they have carefully delineated locations from which they are importing and manufacturing their materials. CLOAK has not released the location where their clothing is being manufactured, only where it will be shipping from; there is no word on whether it’s being imported or is American made. It’s also fairly easy to get prestigious, well-known brands at retail shops like Nordstroms at a cut rate. The only slack CLOAK is willing to cut its first wave of customers is free shipping for any order over $100—and only a single product in their line was over a hundred bucks, which means fans would have to buy at least three t-shirts to hit this discount.

As for breathability and comfort, the majority of CLOAK’s products are made out of 75 percent polyester, a material that is not known for its breathability; spandex tends to be the second-highest listed material on the site. Only its four hoodies are made of cotton, and none are pure. Some fans seem to believe they’re getting higher quality clothing out of the arrangement, but this doesn’t seem to be true. The highest compliments delivered to the brand’s first recipients is that the shirts don’t ride up, the seams hold under moderate activity, and the shirts are tagless. While the company’s goal to make comfortable clothing seems to have been reached, nothing about recent reactions from the fanbase suggests that the clothing is in any way different from any other athleisure brand.

The excuse Markiplier and Jacksepticeye have floated for the exorbitant prices of the line and the combination of materials used is that they are made out of custom material, which is custom sewn and cut. With no maker or importer listed on the website beyond the fact that the company’s warehouse is in Los Angeles, it’s impossible to ascertain such a claim. When asked in a live Youtube AMA, Markiplier also stated he has no idea who designed their logos, something a company toting “custom-made clothing” should at least have a grip on. Jacksepticeye has gone on to separately claim that they are manufacturing the clothing ethically—but has offered no proof that this is true as of this writing. In fact, the process of manufacturing polyester, which is non biodegradable, can cause significant environmental damage.

Most damning of all, CLOAK has a section to which fans are allowed to submit their ideas and designs for CLOAK products—and the legalspeak at the bottom of the page informs them that they will not be reimbursed if their suggestions are picked up by the company.

“Thank you thank you thank you for believing in what we’re building!” — Markiplier, Tumblr

The most interesting part of the entire dust-up has been watching how Jacksepticeye and Markiplier have employed the intensely close parasocial relationship between themselves and their fanbase to push the clothing line, and how how the fanbase has pushed back.

Markiplier has long been on a level of incredibly, amazingly intense emotional involvement with his fanbase, whom he has let in on the intense highs and lows of his life. His brand is sincerity, from video’d mea culpas in which he cries over letting his audience down to vlogs shot from his hospital bed just before going in for surgery. Audiences have followed him through the adoption of his dog, Chica, and the crushing loss of one of his nieces in a car accident. In fact, he’s cried on camera so often that he’s mocked himself for it. Jacksepticeye, meanwhile, has been less publicly vulnerable while remaining emotionally accessible, and is something of a source of mischief and fun instead. He’s coined the term “PMA” to rally his fanbase around him—short for Positive Mental Attitude, a believe-and-you-will-achieve rallying cry. This kind of bald-faced sincerity has been the men’s conduit to both personal success (both rake in millions thanks to their channels, sponsored videos, and other brand deals) and in raising millions for charity.

This, naturally, has resulted in two intense fanbases who believe that Markiplier and Jacksepticeye’s work has saved their lives, that both men truly care about them, and that they are “in this” together. But this time, it’s been different. Gushing reactions from fans—who seem to believe this is a long-held dream of Markiplier and Jacksepticeye’s, two men who have never expressed an interest in fashion in any of their many videos before the line’s launch—have been met with recrimination. At the time of writing this article, the highest-rated comment on Markiplier’s launch announcement video was critical, with over a thousand upvotes. Claims that CLOAK is “our brand” have been met by arguments from other fans who feel left out, bewildered or lied to.

They have fought this critique by claiming that criticism is fine with them—and continuing to mix intimate talk with promises that they’re really, truly sincere about everything they’re doing with the brand. Markiplier, for instance, has announced that they’ll divert their personal take of the money the company makes for at least a year or more. This is apparently a “gesture of sincerity.” Markiplier is selling this as an “adventure” that he and the fanbase are taking together. “CLOAK is our commitment to you,” Markiplier says, exemplifying the cheery bond-fostering speak that has permeated the launch like cheap commercial perfume. What does that mean? The fanbase doesn’t seem to know.

If the line is priced well out of the range of the teenagers and college-aged people who mainly watch the jacksepticeye and markiplier channels, if CLOAK doesn’t have a public buy-in IPO, if the brand doesn’t state it’s benefiting any charitable causes, then how is it a “brand for the fans?” The only way it seems to be “for everyone” is that it’s committed to producing products in all sizes and using models who are plus-sized—but the initial launch line’s sizes ended at a 3X, once again shutting out thousands though they have stated plans to expand past that size.

Who is CLOAK for, then, if it’s both for everyone and not for every single person? Upper middle-class fans of either or both men who want social clout? Gamers who want an elite brand while wearing clothing that’s of no better quality than what they could buy at their local department store or at a trusted online shop? It’s a muddled message that’s been successful so far. Whether it will continue to be so, and if the twosome’s sincerity will avoid straining further credulity, remains up in the air.

]]>Be it wargaming armies or Dungeons & Dragons minis, there’s something magical about watching that tiny little figure you’ve spent hours laboring over come to life on the game table.

Do you want to get into mini painting and aren’t sure what to ask for for the holidays? Does your friend have approximately 100 unpainted Orcs that they field every single game and you’re sick of facing down a tide of gray? Don’t worry, because I’m here to suggest the perfect gifts for your mini-painting friends, both beginners and established hobbyists alike!

While not explicitly a painting supply, a mouldline remover is a nifty little metal tool that allows you to scrape off any rough bits on your mini before you start priming and painting. Most miniatures are going to have mouldlines somewhere on the model from where the mold seam was during casting, and left untouched, those lines will stand out like a sore thumb once paint is applied to the model. These scrappers allow you to clean up those rough edges, ensuring you get the prettiest model you can to represent your half-elf werebear life cleric on the D&D table. If you can find a different brand scraper, go for it! I believe Army Painter makes one, too.

Primer may vary based on your model, but its hard to go wrong with a flat black primer as a starting point. Most mini paints will cover up the black without any issue, even the lighter colors, and the black paint will work well in the recesses that are hard to reach with a brush. I’ve listed both Army Painter and Citadel paint here to give two price points, and in my experience, you get what you pay for: Citadel is a little more pigmented and will give you better coverage, requiring one fewer coat, and Army Painter is cheaper but may require an extra pass before you can start painting. Both are really solid paints, so either will serve you well.

Protip: if the person you are shopping for is painting a wargaming army (like, say, an army of Plague Marines for Warhammer 40k), and therefore has about 70 minis to paint, look to see if you can get a primer in their primary color. This will save your gift recipient some of the legwork of having to paint all their power armor that charming fetid green color—the only downside is the price tends to be higher.

2.5 Paint brands

I’d be remiss if I didn’t take a moment to delve further into paint brands before I move on, because it is definitely an overwhelming topic when first starting out. Here is the crash course: never use craft acrylics—they are too thick and obscure the details on the mini. They are tempting because they are extremely cheap, but mini paints are made to be a specific consistency and pigmentation for a reason.

That said, there are a few brands to choose from: Army Painter, Vallejo, and Citadel are all popular brands I’ve seen in gaming stores. Army Painter is cheap and readily available, but just like their base coat, the paints are not as pigmented, requiring more coats to get the color you want. Vallejo is about midway between Army Painter and Citadel in price, but I haven’t tested it out, so I can’t speak to its quality—I have heard good things, however.

Citadel paint is the Games Workshop brand of paint and the most expensive of the bunch, with a single pot running about $4, but it’s smooth, very pigmented, and, if you’re painting Age of Sigmar or Warhammer 40k armies, the colors are exactly what you see on the box of minis you just bought, so it’s easy to match. I’m partial to Citadel myself, but it’s really going to be a matter of personal preference.

Okay, time to get off my paint brand soapbox. Moving on…

3. The Four Pillars of Brushes: a Basing Brush, a Shading Brush, a Drybrush… Brush?, and a Detail Brush

Okay, so I literally just made up the four Pillars of Brushes thing, but I’ve found that I can do just about anything I need with one of these four different kinds of brushes.

Now, disclaimer about brushes: they are kind of a personal thing. The brushes I love to use are ones my partner never touches. You sort of just trial and error it until you find what ones you like.

This brush set is an incredibly cheap starting point and will likely contain a detail brush and basing brush your painter will like using. I have a very similar old craft set that has served me well, although the handles are beginning to fall apart after about three years of use.

As for the shading brush, I’m partial to this one from Citadel, and the drybrush I use is included in this set here (which also has a detail and basing brush, though I can’t speak to their quality). With these four brushes, you can make a solid mini with base coat, highlights, and shading that will look great on the table.

It is a universal rule of all apartments that there is never enough direct lighting to work on detailed craft work no matter where you sit. Save your painter from having to squint at their minis in the dim light of their computer monitor and get them a clamp desk lamp, preferably one that gives them some range of movement to twist and turn the thing for best mini viewing. This one is nice because you can swap out the bulb for one that has lighting you like (this bulb comes highly recommended).

JoAnn Fabrics also has regular deals on lamps, so if you’re looking for a deal, keep an eye on their coupons. I’d avoid getting a lamp with a magnifying glass on it unless you know for sure that you want it—my depth perception is terrible and I think they’d only make painting the minis harder, but your mileage may vary.

I. Love. This. Stuff. Seriously, if you paint at all, miniatures or otherwise, get some. The paint you use when painting minis tends to be super pigmented, so brushes will stain and become stiff with paint residue very quickly. This brush cleaner not only gets out all the stubborn dried up paint, but it also works wonders for reshaping your paintbrush bristles back into the nice crisp point that is so crucial to detailed mini painting. I’ve brought old, neglected brushes back from the grave with this stuff, it is absolutely worth buying and is a total miracle worker.

Mini painting can be an overwhelming hobby to break in to, but the end result is incredibly rewarding. Give your tabletop gaming or wargaming friends the gift of mini painting so they, too, can have boxes full of Warhammer minis and bags of paint sat on every flat surface in their house.

]]>http://sidequest.zone/2018/12/17/5-gift-ideas-for-all-your-mini-painting-needs/feed/095670Table for One: Board Games to Play on Your Ownhttp://sidequest.zone/2018/12/13/table-for-one-board-games-to-play-on-your-own/
http://sidequest.zone/2018/12/13/table-for-one-board-games-to-play-on-your-own/#respondThu, 13 Dec 2018 15:00:57 +0000http://sidequest.zone/?p=95216Cathryn Sinjin-Starr shares a list of board games that you can play by yourself, including Gloomhaven, Legacy of Dragonholt, and Tiny Epic Quest.

]]>There are times when you just miss the tactile nature of physically playing a game—the dealing of cards, the rolling of dice, the organising of your resource cubes. But how can you play board games by yourself, whether it’s because everyone is busy or you just want to eschew other human beings for a spell? Are you reduced to another stirring round of Solitaire? Will you bean-count as you shift those stones in Mancala? Fear not, intrepid adventure-seeker. A number of multiplayer board games have supplied rules for solo play, allowing you to embark on desktop expeditions with only yourself against the world.

Tiny Epic Quest

Game Design by Scott Almes
Published by Gamelyn Games
Release Date: 2017

The Tiny Epic series of games by Gamelyn Games prides itself on being a lot of fun with a small footprint. Coming in boxes similar in size to a pack of greeting cards, they are easy for travel and can be set up anywhere with a flat surface. Each game has a different theme and a fun unique mechanic differentiating it in the series.

In the case of Tiny Epic Quest, you are whisked into a fantasy foray for magical artifacts and magic spells, fighting off invading goblins and earning buffs from completing quests with a band of three Meeples at the players’ disposal. Each round comprises of a day phase and night phase. During the day phase, players move their Meeples around to acquire quests, set up for learning a spell, or beginning their temple delves. The night phase is the Adventuring turn—players learn spells, explore temples, and fight goblins, then set the board again for the next round’s day phase.

The game introduces ITEMeeples—tiny little items that can clip onto your Meeples, one for each item that can be earned in-game. Players can earn Legendary Weapons (also represented with ITEMeeples), following the guide on their player card (each player card has a different pathway for this), which will aid in questing as well as earning more points during the final scoring phase. Players are scored on quests completed, goblins killed, spells learned, and Legendary Weapons acquired. Whoever has the most points at the end, wins—unless you’re playing “The Legend of the Chosen One”, the Solo Run ruleset.

In this mode, you choose a difficulty level at the beginning, which will determine the Victory Points you need in the scoring round. There are also small variations to how movement, spell acquisition, and the night phase work, but the mechanics don’t change much. This mode can be a challenge compared to the multiplayer one. Whereas multiplayer requires you just to beat the score of the people beside you, Solo requires beating a definite threshold. You’re playing against the game, and may require a different approach in order to best it.

Fallout: The Board Game

Game Design by Andrew Fischer with Nathan Hajek
Published by Fantasy Flight Games
Release Date: 2017

Dark Souls, Bloodborne, This War of Mine, XCOM—what do these titles all have in common? Are they grim post-apocalyptic horrorshows meant to crush your spirit (either by bleakness or just sheer grueling difficulty)? Well, yes, but that’s not all! They’re all video games that have become board games. And joining their ranks is Fallout.

Based on the Fallout game series, particularly Bethesda’s revival with Fallout 3 and Fallout 4, Fallout: The Board Game sees each player taking control of a wasteland survivor. Each survivor is unique from playthrough-to-playthrough—they have one set skill based on their type, but they also get a random skill at the start of each game. These skills make up their S.P.E.C.I.A.L. stats, Fallout’s flavour of ability scores. Also forming your character are perks, one-use special abilities that can turn tables, and traits, tokens that may sway how your survivor reacts to the game world and vice versa.

To start a game, players choose from the scenario deck and set up the game board tiles accordingly. The scenario will have a main objective, as well as outlines on the activity of two warring factions. The players must complete the objective whilst avoiding either faction gaining the lead. If one faction gains too much power, it’s game over for everyone. As they explore, players can pick up sidequests. These can change how their story progresses, but can also yield Influence. Influence is the scoring currency of the game and the first player to reach the designated goal wins the game. One of the intriguing asides to winning is that you must declare that you have enough Influence to reach it. But this means you can choose to NOT declare it, wait for someone else, and then reveal after they have won that you also have enough and thus share in victory. It’s an interesting twist to the “first one there wins” mentality we’re used to seeing with games.

Solo Play rules are very similar to standard group rules, with only a couple mechanic exceptions that usually need other players. The winning requirements are still the same and whilst you do not have anyone trying to sabotage you, you also do not have anyone else aiding in keeping the factions at bay.

Legacy of Dragonholt

If Dungeons & Dragons had a baby with Choose-Your-Own-Adventure books, that baby would be Legacy of Dragonholt. Using the new Oracle game system, Legacy of Dragonholt lets players create characters an adventure without a Game Master present. With no traditional game board, the game is played out through character sheets and the many quest books. Much like CHYOA narratives, players will read through a quest book, be presented with a choice with a page number, and follow through on the designated page. Some choices will tell you to mark certain Story Points in the campaign tracker. You may find that later choices will ask if these Story Points are completed, leading to different results. Some choices may also require specific character skills, such as thievery. Once you finish one of the quest books, your character is taken forward onto the next one. The system is made so that you can take one character through the whole campaign of quest books, just like in a traditional tabletop roleplaying game campaign.

When starting a new campaign, the first quest book will outline what changes are needed between playing with one player or multiple players, such as if you start with alternate stats. The largest differences are choices and skills. When playing solo, you are the only one that needs to make decisions. Multiplayer, however, requires the use of activation tokens. Each player gets one and starts with it set to active. When presented with a choice, the group decides who will make the decision. That player then makes the decision as they see fit and turns over their token. They are now deactivated from choices until all player tokens are refreshed. Once all players have exhausted their tokens, they flip them back over to active and repeat the cycle.

There is a trade-off to this. Where playing solo means you don’t have to answer to anyone else, it does also mean that you are limited to only your own skills. If you chose to play a mage, you won’t be able to perform the skills that require a thief. So whilst you are able to make all decisions, there will be some choices you simply can’t choose because you don’t have the skillset in your party of One.

Gloomhaven

Game Design by Isaac Childres
Published by Cephalofair Games
Release Date: 2017

Folks, what we have here is the Mac Daddy of recent tabletop games. Following two successful Kickstarter campaigns for the first and second printing, followed by a third printing, and a planned expansion in the near future, Gloomhaven has been the hot new kid on the block. Gloomhaven is a campaign-driven tabletop roleplaying game. Similar to Legacy of Dragonholt, it is made to be played by persistent characters in an evolving setting. The choices you may along the way changes the world around you.

Whereas Legacy of Dragonholt leans towards the Choose-Your-Own-Adventure book style, Gloomhaven leans more towards traditional board game with a plethora of cards, board pieces, interlocking map tiles, and player figures. This box is BIG, all caps. And that space is filled to the brim with stuff, with the box weight clocking in at just over 20 pounds. As the game progresses, players place stickers on the world map and player mats to show discoveries and progress. Whilst the stickers are meant to be permanent for a long-haul campaign, some players have managed around this with sticky dots, reusable stickers, or tracking progress outside of the supplied game materials entirely.

Playing this game solo is virtually no different than with other players. Instead of multiple players controlling characters, you control multiple characters yourself. It’s more like a video game RPG in that sense, where you the player has control of a full party. Because of this, the game rules suggest that for whatever scenario difficulty you run into, increase the difficulty level by one. This is because part of the challenge in multiplayer is that you don’t know what the other player will do, whereas playing all characters removes that difficulty. This is, of course, at your discretion—it’s your campaign to play.

With a large story campaign to plow through and a striving creation community with the game designer’s blessings, there is a lot of playtime to get out of Gloomhaven. There are a few caveats to keep in mind. Firstly, this game is ridiculously hard to find. I only found it when I went abroad to the US during the summer. There were three copies in the shop, one of which we bought. When we went back to the store two days later, the rest were gone and no more expected to come. Secondly, even when you do find it, the price tag may give you a heart attack. Retailing at $135, you can believe I sure had one (and then blew through my luggage weight limit, so add $50 shipping on there). And that’s for when it’s being sold in stores. On marketplaces like eBay or Amazon Seller, new undamaged copies will easily cost you over $200.

It’s a steep price tag, especially if you intend to play the game solo. However, if you can find somewhere to give it a try and you really enjoy it, the sheer amount of stuff is a wonderful treat for those that appreciate quality game pieces and props. And for being a campaign game you can play on your own, you have everything you need in one box. For me, I was able to justify the cost because we could not find this game back here in the UK and it was my birthday, so we treated ourselves. It ultimately comes down to your priorities as to whether or not it’s worth it. And you can always wait for the video game to come out early next year, developed by Flaming Fowl Studios and published by Asmodee Digital.

This is by no means an exhaustive list – far from it! There are more in the Tiny Epic series in different flavours with Galaxies, Zombies, Westerns, Defenders, and upcoming title Mechs. Other board games based on video games are those listed previously, as well as other genres like Sid Meier’s: Civilization, Plague Inc. and Portal. For narrative-based games, you have series like Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective, Mice & Mystics, Eldritch Horror, and The 7th Continent. And for those that want lots of bits and bobs to play with, you have games like Scythe, The City of Kings, Agricola, Gaia Project, and Suburbia. These games are all possible to play either on your own or with/against others, so you get twice the mileage out of them. Whether everyone’s busy or just you need a bit of me-time, you don’t need to let a lack of players stop you—claim that whole table for yourself and embark on your own personal adventure.

]]>http://sidequest.zone/2018/12/13/table-for-one-board-games-to-play-on-your-own/feed/095216GYGO: SonicFox, Dragon Age 4, and Super Smash Bros. Ultimatehttp://sidequest.zone/2018/12/12/gygo-sonicfox-dragon-age-4-and-super-smash-bros-ultimate/
http://sidequest.zone/2018/12/12/gygo-sonicfox-dragon-age-4-and-super-smash-bros-ultimate/#respondWed, 12 Dec 2018 15:00:14 +0000http://sidequest.zone/?p=95677In this week's news, we have all the exciting new announcements from The Game Awards, as well as a bunch of neat-looking deals!

]]>Happy Wednesday! What games are you playing this week? I finally bought a Switch last month and have been happily playing Night in the Woods, Let’s Go: Eevee, Skyrim, and Paladins on it. I also started Doki Doki Literature Club, which is available free for PC and Mac. Let us know on Twitter what games you’re playing and what upcoming games you’re excited about!

The Game Awards and SonicFox

The Game Awards happened last Thursday night. Here’s a full list of winners. God of War took home Game of the Year. Also nominated in that category were Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, Celeste, Spider-Man, Monster Hunter: World, and Red Dead Redemption 2. God of War, Red Dead Redemption 2, and Fortnite won some of the highest profile awards. Notably, Florence, which stars a Chinese-Australian main character, won Best Mobile Game. Celeste won Best Independent Game.

Huge congratulations go to the winner for Best Esports Player, SonicFox. In his acceptance speech, he said, “As you guys also may know, or may not know, I’m also super gay, so I mean, I want to give a super shoutout to all my LGBTQ+ friends that have always helped me through life.”

Overwatch Winter Wonderland

Overwatch‘s annual winter event returned this week and runs until January 2. Mercy, Widowmaker, Bastion, and Symmetra are among those receiving new event skins each representing a different winter sport.

Mortal Kombat 11 Trailer Revealed

More News

Epic Games released its new store last week, featuring games from various studios. Subnautica, which is enjoying some buzz among a number of Twitch streamers, is free from December 14 to December 27. Epic Games’ new store is a welcome move in the eyes of many gamers especially since Steam has been the subject of significant issues over the past year.

Games Bleat

Welcome to Games Bleat! I’m Joesph, and I’m the head gaming supervisor at Santa’s workshop. It’s tough work, a lot of hours spent grinding for those Fortnite skins the kids keep asking for. Along the way I’ve also discovered some hot sales and new releases that would make perfect gifts for that special someone this year!

First is GRIS! This highly anticipated puzzle platformer has been predicted to be one of the most beautiful games of 2018. It’s easy to see why, its illustrative style reminding me a bit of 2012’s Journey. The main character learns from her surroundings as the story goes on, and the setting changes to reflect that. Simultaneously, the game sets aside death mechanics and the punishing difficulty that platformers are often known for. Best of all, it’s hitting both PC and Nintendo Switch, meaning I can take it on the go!

Next is The Doll Shop by Atelier Sentô. Atelier Sentô is a French development duo who take inspiration from their frequent trips to Japan. The Doll Shop is a visual novel drawing on time spent in the countryside. Its blend of romance and horror was artfully hand painted by students at ECV art school in Bordeaux, France. It looks both haunting and beautiful, and I’m excited to dive in a little later!

Finally I have Hot Pot Panic, one of the most relatable games I’ve ever stumbled across. You play a very hungry person catching up with a friend over hot pot. You want your friend to feel listened to and appreciated, but you also want to scarf down the entire store’s supply of meat and broth. As the player, you juggle the two by shifting your attention between the friend and bowl full of cooking meat, truly trying to live the best of both worlds.

And that’s it for this week’s bleat! I’m about to go get destroyed by Rudolf in Smash, but I’ll catch you next week for more news, games, and deals!

]]>One of the first tasks you take on as you’re playing through Spider-Man for the PS4 is the collecting of backpacks webbed up in various locations. These backpacks contain some of Peter Parker’s old things; little artifacts of his life, both civilian and heroic. How those backpacks are staying webbed up when everyone knows Peter’s webs dissolve after an hour is a question for another time, though. Right now is the time for food, because one of the artifacts found those backpacks is an index card containing the recipe for Aunt May’s Famous Wheatcakes.

Look, I have never said no to breakfast food in my life, so I immediately called my husband into the room and showed him the recipe. “Let’s make these,” I said, and not to undercut the suspense, but we definitely did.

May Parker’s recipe calls for two different kinds of wheat, zero sugar, and entirely too much attention devoted to a pair of eggs. Here’s the recipe, verbatim, so you don’t have to do what I did and take screenshots on your PS4, then post those screenshots to your activity feed, so that you could then load the activity feed on your PlayStation app on your phone, where you could then download those screenshots (hey Sony, maybe give us a little more flexibility regarding image storage).

Whip two egg whites until stiff (but not dry!) then fold them into the batter gently until blended. Don’t overmix!

Cook on a greased hot griddle or frying pan, until small bubbles appear on top. Then turn pancakes over, and cook until bottom is lightly browned, serve hot with butter and maple syrup.

May’s recipe could be organized a little better, but it’s solid. One thing to note is that the batter will not look attractive when you’re ready to cook them. It’s grey and lumpy, and just looks very unpleasant. Don’t worry though, that’s how it’s supposed to look. The pancakes brown nicely when cooking, and smell great.

It looks like cement, right? It’s not just me?

How do they taste, though? Pretty good! They’re denser than regular pancakes, and not as sweet, due to the complete lack of sugar (don’t worry, the molasses helps here). They’re more filling than regular pancakes too, given how thick they are. May’s tip about the butter and maple syrup is perfect (I know, syrup and pancakes, shocking); the cakes have a strong buckwheat flavor, and because they’re not as sweet, it makes the presence of the syrup more obvious, which is quite nice.

Overall? May’s official recipe is good enough that we’d definitely make it again, and we’re keeping it around just in case we feel like it. If you want an extra little bit of flavor, you could try adding cinnamon or nutmeg, or if you’re like we are in this household (PUNCH US IN THE FACE WITH FLAVOR), you could add more molasses to the batter so that the taste of it really comes through. Give them a try though, they’re pretty good!

]]>There was a little bit of a… thing back when the most recent Spider-Man game came about. Not a real backlash, just a bit of a kerfuffle, really, about how the game features Spider-Man assisting the NYPD in repairing a surveillance network that spanned the entire city. It’s the kind of thing that in real life would be pretty bad, but because this is a game, the system works perfectly and elegantly, only providing the locations of crimes in progress and not spying on the day-to-day lives of everyday citizens.

That, combined with our friendly neighborhood hero’s frequent lapses into the playful identity of “Spider-Cop” while talking to Police Captain Yuri Watanabe, created an atmosphere that was, if anything, more akin to Brooklyn Nine-Nine than any kind of real, impactful exploration of what it means to assist the institution that is the police.

It’s a given, isn’t it? Spider-Man is a vigilante, but this is a superhero world, and as long as he’s more or less working on the side of the angels, he’s going to have a semi-friendly relationship with the police. There are certainly stories that explore what happens when they’re against him, but this game isn’t that. By and large, his dealings with the NYPD here are a footnote, something that is secondary to the fact that a man who runs a food bank doubles as an energy-wielding, zombie-creating mob king.

That attitude changes around the start of the second chapter of the City That Never Sleeps DLC, entitled Turf Wars. The DLC opens much like the main game did; Spider-Man arrives on the scene of a siege situation, where a mobster is holed up inside of a building and the police are trying to arrest him. The two situations play out very differently, however; in the start of the main game, that mobster is the Kingpin, and Spider-Man only goes in, on his own, after the police have made an attempt to bring him out peacefully. Spider-Man goes in to assist, to rescue; he’s focused on getting civilians out and ending threats to officers in danger.

Spider-Cop has become a distinct entity within the Spider-Verse; separate even from his video-game counterpart, on the right of the panel.

In Turf Wars, however, when attempting to bring down lower-case-kingpin Hammerhead, Spider-Man arrives on the scene with the police, and is part of their entire plan to bust Hammerhead’s encampment open. He provides the ingress points, using webs to create ziplines so that a SWAT team can go in (with lethal force) and then sets about creating a distraction to draw as many mob goons to him in front of the building as he can, to make their attempt at infiltration more likely to succeed.

The problem, here, is twofold; first, the active inclusion of Spider-Man in the department’s planning is a tacit endorsement by that department of an unlicensed vigilante operating outside of the law. Heroes in comics have typically operated in a kind of grey area, legally; police organizations can’t really be seen officially endorsing them, but no one says no when the man in the rhinoceros armor is plowing through city blocks. Similarly, there’s a reason Batman and Gordon meet on rooftops at night, away from prying eyes. It’s also an endorsement by Spider-Man of lethal enforcement tactics; the character who bears the twin burdens of power and responsibility is saying, through his actions, that he endorses and indeed will actively aid a team of lethally trained SWAT officers in bunker busting.

The second part of that problem is what the tone of the game becomes. Spoiler alert: the mission goes horribly, horribly wrong. So do several more missions after that, until the tone throughout the Turf Wars DLC is clear; this is a city where the mobsters are literally at war with the police. It posits those same police, unquestioningly, as moral heroes standing against the unrelenting tide of villainy that is Hammerhead’s forces. Because it does this so unquestioningly, with Spider-Man’s tacit endorsement of their tactics, it comes off as unabashedly pro-police in a way that the primary game did not, and in a way that is blatantly dangerous for media to do in the modern age.

Propaganda? What Propaganda?

As of this writing, 857 people in the U.S. have been killed by police in the year 2018. Of those 857, 369 were reported to be white people, which means that well over half (488) have been people of color, in a country where well over half of the overall population is white. It is a recorded and reported fact that police have disproportionately targeted people of color over white people, and that of those they have overwhelmingly targeted Black people. The police rarely face any kind of consequences for this; even on the occasion that an officer will lose a job over it, they will often just get a new job doing the same thing—sometimes elsewhere, sometimes back in the same department.

Police officers often paint themselves as a kind of last line of defense; oftentimes they believe, and would have you believe, that they are all that stands between your safe, comfortable life and a world of unrelenting crime and chaos. There is a term for this concept: the Thin Blue Line. When the Black Lives Matter movement began, a movement specifically about the murder of Black people by police officers, that movement’s more virulently racist detractors formed a counter-movement of their own. Blue Lives Matter purported the idea that officers face even more danger, and are thus more deserving of protection.

The Thin Blue Line is such a prevalent idea that it has its own emblem. A company known as Blue Line Productions, Inc., has been selling products to certified police officers in the U.S. since 1993, and since the dawn of the Black Lives Matter movement (and its Blue Lives Matter counterpart) a new design has come to prominence. That design, a black-and-white rendition of the American flag with a single blue line in place of one of the white ones, visually puts that blue line in front of the flag; iconography depicting the police as defending the United States of America, even as those same police disproportionately attack and harass the country’s marginalized communities.

This achievement triggering is the moment I went from “I feel weird about this” to “OH NO”

The fact of the matter remains that, even on its best days, the institution of the police is an institution of power, and that power is unevenly applied. It disproportionately targets marginalized communities, the kinds of individuals that comic book heroes were created to protect. Superman got his start taking down tyrannical landlords to protect the poor. Spider-Man himself learned a lesson about the preciousness of life when his own uncle was murdered by a man he could’ve stopped. When police departments deploy SWAT teams, when they murder civilians without due process, these are choices that people make. These events are not accidents, they’re not up to the whims of fate. Officers enter a situation with lethal force on the table, on the mind. For all that the institution and fictional costumed heroes operate on marginally the same side of the law, there is a significant moral and philosophical difference between “stopping the bad guys” and saving those in need. For such a character as Spider-Man to endorse, by both word and deed, the actions of an institution that has a real-life, historical record of injustice and murder, is a grave disservice to that character’s own history, to his creators, and to the very idea of heroism.

]]>Welcome, fellow game players. I, personally, have some news—this will be my last time sitting down with you (across the vastness of the internet) to share the gaming industry’s news. It’s time for me to move on to larger projects, such as, uh, editing this site. Our copyeditor, Emily Durham, will be taking over my spot from now on, which is great! You’ll like her.

Anyway, let’s get to the news you actually care about, shall we?

Fallout 76 Has Bag Problems

So, uh, Fallout 76, huh? I confess, I haven’t played it—I’ve never been a fan of the series. But for those who are, the game seems to be a bit of a mess, but crashes and a lonely world aren’t why it’s in the spotlight right now.

What’s drawn player ire is that purchasers of the game’s Power Armor Edition didn’t receive the promised canvas bag as part of the package. Instead, they received a nylon bag of noticeably thinner material. According to an email screenshot posted to Twitter, Bethesda’s response to an inquiry about the bag was, “The bag shown in the media was a prototype and was too expensive to make. We aren’t planning on doing anything about it.”

Bethesda followed up on @AllGamesDelta_‘s tweet to say that the person who answered the email was not a Bethesda employee and responded incorrectly.

The Bethesda Store's Support member is a temporary contract employee and not directly employed by Bethesda or Bethesda Game Studios. We apologize to the customer who took the time to reach out. The support response was incorrect and not in accordance with our conduct policy.

The company followed up again to say that it material unavailability was the actual reason the canvas bags were not produced.

Unfortunately, due to unavailability of materials, we had to switch to a nylon carrying case in the Fallout 76: Power Armor Edition. We hope this doesn’t prevent anyone from enjoying what we feel is one of our best collector’s editions.

A group of players has been banned for life after spouting homophobic slurs and threats in Fallout 76. One of the banned players, who spoke to Kotaku about the incident, said he didn’t regret it and wouldn’t apologize, and that it was all “playful immaturity.” There are no words for the level of awful the incident is, and despite Bethesda’s other sketchy moves, it’s a relief that the group has been banned.

Gaming News Tidbits

Steam is catering even harder to AAA developers with new changes to their financial terms. Under these new terms, if a game makes over $10 million, the revenue share will increase to 75 percent earnings going to the publisher and 25 percent going to steam. This increases again at $50 million to an 80/20 split.

Nintendo has updated their guidelines for streaming and other content creators to allow monetization. This is a big move for the company, which previously required creators to join a Nintendo-specific program that gave a portion of the money earned to both Nintendo and Google. Without that program, streamers and YouTubers can earn the same amount of money as they would with any other publisher’s games.

Games Done Quick has parted ways with several previous participants after another speedrunner revealed screenshots from private Discord servers that showed them making transphobic, antisemitic, and misogynistic remarks. Games Done Quick had previously announced that they wouldn’t be taking action against the streamers due to a lack of evidence, but after pressure from the community, the organization announced the streamers would no longer be participating in any GDQ events indefinitely.

Carolyn Enlow, one of Sierra OnLine’s first female coders, has passed away at 77. Enlow primarily worked on educational games, and left Sierra OnLine to design her own game with her then-husband, Bob Box.

In the wake of news that Tumblr will be removing adult content from the site starting December 17, game designer Robert Yang tweeted that he was pretty certain the Tumblr account for Cobra Club, in which players snap dick pics for a dating app, was the most prolific gay porn account. Unfortunately, it’s almost certain that these posts will all be taken down along with the rest of the adult content on Tumblr—if you want to take a look at a seriously impressive array of dick pics, now’s your last chance.

ok after a bit of research, I feel fairly confident in claiming it was *the* biggest gay porn tumblr in all of tumblr… the nearest competitor I could find was "gay-porn-dudes" with a mere 30,000 posts!……. where's my trophy https://t.co/835fdUw2pi

Games Bleat

Welcome to Games Bleat! I’m Joesph, the gaming gremlin, and I’ve been squatting in a cave all week, searching Lolth’s web for deals and new releases! Boy howdy did it pay off, turns out Lolth is into LAN parties! Who knew?

Anyway I’ll start off with the deals that the spider queen so thoughtfully gifted us.

First is Iris.Fall, a puzzle adventure game that takes chiaroscuro to a whole new level! Yes, gremlins can know what chiaroscuro is. Gremlins can have art degrees as well as game! Anyway, Iris.Fall looks absolutely gorgeous, with a varied style that brings a whole lot of depth with it, not the least bit because of the whole light and shadow thing.

Next is KATAMARI DAMACY REROLL! There’s really no real way to describe Katamari games, not in a manner that does them justice. Just know there’s a lot of rolling, and a vague sense of whimsical dread that just keeps driving you through the game. In a fun way, you know?

Finally I have Simmiland, a game by the Sokpop Collective (who are making really cool games demi-monthly over on their patreon btw ). Simmiland is a god game about playing cards until the apocalypse comes. Birth humans, build a following, gather their faith, and maybe save their lives in the face of impending doom. It’s a small game, but it’s price also starts at $5, so what’s there to lose?

And that’s it for this week’s bleat! Lolth and I have to go set up our connection for a Civilization marathon, but I’ll catch you next time for more deals, releases, and charming affectations!

]]>Weather Factory producer Lottie Bevan recently announced the formation of Coven Club, a monthly London event for women in the games industry. Known for her work with Failbetter Games on titles such as Fallen London, Sunless Sea: Zubmariner, and Sunless Skies, Bevan more recently left Failbetter to launch Weather Factory with her partner, game developer and Failbetter Games founder Alexis Kennedy. Weather Factory successfully Kickstarted and created Cultist Simulator, an innovative card-based narrative game of delving into the sorts of weird and transcendental horror that give the various Failbetter titles their distinctive mood.

From her announcement about Coven Club: “Coven Club is a new, monthly London meetup for women in the games industry. It aims to help women form friendships and networks with other ladygamers by providing a free venue and that incredibly supportive, well-wishy atmosphere you find at women-only events.”

Bevan was kind enough to answer some questions for us.

Was Failbetter where you got your start in the software and/or video game industry? If not, what other fun stuff did you work on before that?

I actually started at an advergames studio, interning as their content producer (read: I ran the Twitter feed). When I became producer there, I worked on a couple of, er, interesting games—one 3D racer for an insurance company which taught people very bad road safety; one Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles-inspired surfwear game featuring, of course, rats; and a non-violent underwater horror game for an independent client, to name a few. But advergames didn’t feel as soulful to me as commercial games, and I’d been a big fan of Failbetter for years. Getting a job there was a dream come true.

Failbetter is a fairly small, indie studio, but with Weather Factory, you’ve gone ever further in that direction. What was it like to make that leap? Now that it’s just the two of you against the world, is it playing out how you imagined?

I was umming and ahhing over co-founding Weather Factory for months. Alexis is one of the most talented and hard-working devs I know, but being my own boss and responsible for everything from day-to-day money to things like pensions was such a big leap of faith. I finally concluded that this was an opportunity I wasn’t going to get again, especially as I’m still quite early in my career. I figured that on my deathbed I’d rather have given something a shot than not even tried, so I went for it—and it’s been the best thing I ever did. And not *just* because I get to work in my pyjamas.

As I understand it, Weather Factory’s workflow is essentially Alexis howling unspeakable words and code into the fathomless void, and you poking him with a cattle prod to keep him going in the right direction while packaging his beautiful nonsense into something people will pay money for. Is that at all accurate? How would you describe your process?

This is 100 percent the most accurate description I have ever heard. It’s actually been very eye-opening: production’s role is facilitating a team of people, which means there’s a lot of emphasis on process and figuring out the midpoint which makes everyone 80 percent happy (rather than a few people 100 percent happy). At Weather Factory, as we’re so small, the process needs to be built around one developer, which is a whole new exercise in dev psychology and setting up scalable processes with only one datapoint… it’s been really interesting! When in doubt, though, the cattle prod helps.

Speaking of process (readers love process), you do a lot of the visual design, art, and/or art direction, right? Can you tell us a bit about your process, what tools and software you use, stuff like that?

I do! Our original art direction was devised by a very talented freelancer named Catherine Unger, and we also work with the two-person team Clockwork Cuckoo for the sheer volume of art we actually need. I’m in charge of the later art direction, draw a bunch of the icons, and do all the graphic design for sites/ads/whatever. My process is basically ‘carve out a day for art,’ then put on a true crime podcast, bring up some 1920s reference images for, like, pathogenic dance shoes or atrophied ghost hounds or whatever totally reasonable item Alexis has decided to put in the game, and get on with it. I work almost exclusively in Photoshop, with a Wacom graphics tablet and a whole lot of tea.

Coven Club is just the latest move in your campaign to improve the lives of women in the games industry. Could you tell us about an earlier initiative you’ve been involved with, perhaps one you’ve felt was particularly effective?

I’m a STEM Ambassador, which focuses on speaking to school-age girls about potential jobs in games and getting them just to have the possibility of techy jobs on their radar. As the acronym implies (science, tech, engineering, and maths), games is weirdly a non-presence in a lot of these established feminist initiatives: it’s still such a relatively new, unknown space. So I’ve always had a really great response from the girls I’ve spoken to about games—usually they’ve never even considered it before, or thought there were no women there. There’s also not much awareness about the variety of games roles out there, from artists to musicians to voice actresses to whatever. I think whole lives can change from one realisation that there’s this weird niche job out there that sounds a lot like you—when I left university I didn’t have a clue about what jobs there actually were, beyond what the adults I knew already did. So I’m a big, big STEM fan—though I’d prefer to go with the lesser-known ‘STEAM’ focus, which emphasises the importance of art interacting with all the traditional STEM-subjects too. That’s really the place games sit, I think.

So Coven Club will be a free monthly gathering for women in the gaming industry (who happen to be spatially situated in London at the time of the meeting). You mention it’s specifically not a formal networking event, but rather a have-good-time-make-friends sort of thing. What made you decide to go that route?

There are a number of yay-women events already out there, but they tend to focus on networking and/or cluster around industry events. Firstly, some people find Official Networking quite stressful, and I wanted to do something which would be as friendly as possible, where people could actually be themselves and make more meaningful relationships than purely ‘this person is influential or useful to me, I should befriend them—I also believe business is built around masculine preferences, and I wanted Coven Club to get out of that masculine mode. A lot of my female friends, if given the choice, would want to hang out in a comfortable hipster-ish cafe-bar and drink wine with other cool people, so that’s what I’m aiming for here!

Why is it called “Coven Club?”

I have a whole page of terrible, terrible game-specific alternative names. I realised fairly quickly that all the game-specific stuff that’s not already taken is a bit lame—certainly the stuff I was coming up with was. I chose ‘Coven Club’ because it has a lady-centric meaning without being too in your face about it, and it gestures towards attendees being more than just women who work in games. Too often women in games are described as counterpoints to the norm: you don’t hear about ‘men in games,’ you hear about developers, for example. So again, I wanted to sidestep that whole issue with something that felt unique, attractive, and let me draw a fun witch for the logo. Plus, magic and moonlight and little black cats are rad.

I also write for WWAC, and this is an issue we’ve had to clarify over the years: Is Coven Club open to and/or intended for nonbinary folks?

Coven Club is built upon the shared female experience of being in games, so if people feel that they’ve had that experience, I would absolutely love them to come! What I’m trying to avoid is the typical thing of being a minority at a game-centric event where most people you talk to won’t ‘get’ the issues you experience on a day to day basis—not because they don’t care about them, but because it’s just not the same if you haven’t had that experience yourself.

The female-only events I’ve been to in the past have really had this buoyant sense of support and understanding that I’ve not felt in general events. I’m reluctant to use the word ‘sisterhood’ because it’s a bit, I don’t know, 60s flower child, but there’s definitely something in it.

If you could have any one person, living or dead, show up to a Coven Club meeting, who would it be?

I’ve already fangirled at Robin Hunicke [founder of Funomena and professor of game design at UC Santa Cruz] on a pirate’s ship while the Game of Thrones theme tune played at 292594358439543 decibels (don’t ask), so I think I’d have to pick Jade Raymond [founder of Motive Studios and Ubisoft Toronto]. If she were to ever appear I’d probably stammer out something incoherent and immediately spill wine over myself. So we should probably all pray that she never hears about Coven Club.

More info about Coven Club is available here, and the latest updates can be found at the related Twitter account. Anyone interested in attending can find an RSVP link on the Twitter account’s pinned tweet. The first Coven Club meeting was fully booked shortly after reservations were opened, but there is a waiting list, and future dates will be announced via Twitter.

Perhaps we’ll get to see Bevan lose her cool over meeting Jade Raymond. Until then, let’s hope more women and other marginalized folks in the gaming industry follow suit and create structures to support one another.

]]>My first gaming console was a Game Boy Color my mother received in exchange for some nursing books when I was about eight years old. It was bundled with Super Mario Land and Donkey Kong, though I never managed to get very far in either. I was terrible at sidescrollers and platformers and lacked the patience needed to keep going each time I died. Over the years as I’ve traded up to different consoles and games graphics and mechanics have improved, I’ve avoided sidescrollers and platformers like the Castlevania series, convinced that I simply wasn’t good at them.

Sidequest was provided with a copy of Pixel Ripped 1989 for PlayStation VR in exchange for a fair and honest review.

Pixel Ripped 1989

I really can’t speak as to what compelled me to play Pixel Ripped 1989 by ARVORE Immersive Games, a platformer, a side-scroller, and a VR game all rolled up into one surprisingly fun bundle. Maybe it was the cool 80s aesthetic of the cover art, or the fact that the two main characters are both female, but I’ve never been so happy to break my “no side-scrollers or platformers” rule.

Pixel Ripped 1989 follows the adventures of Dot, a character in a cyber game world played by the player character (stay with me). Dot is an adventurer who is trying to stop the Cyblin Lord (Cyber Goblin, get it?) from destroying both her video game world and the real world, which the Cyblin Lord has the ability to invade and attack at will by ripping through the fabric of reality.

Pixel Ripped 1989 is a game about a game within a game, set in the 80s, and so much of what makes it great is the novelty of the mechanics employed.

In the first level, players take control of a second-grade girl named Nicola as she’s asked to guide Dot to her destination within the game world of her handheld console. However, Nicola isn’t supposed to be playing video games in class, and part of the challenge of completing the task involves using your VR headset to launch spitball wads at different targets around the classroom in an effort to distract the teacher so she won’t catch you. You have to do this while you’re trying to guide Dot through a low-pixel landscape on the handheld console that you control with your PS4 controller. Needless to say, managing these two wildly different aspects of gameplay becomes a little hectic sometimes, and you have to be able to multitask.

Once Dot reaches her destination in the handheld game, the Cyblin Wizard explodes into the human world and rains havoc down on its unsuspecting citizens. This leads to a VR boss fight, such as shooting down malevolent birds before they manage to kidnap your classmates.

The classroom portion of the game was especially difficult for me, given that I haven’t played a sidescroller in years and lack the reflexes needed to get through it without dying several times. Having to split my attention in order to distract the teacher while I played the sidescroller just made everything that much harder, but somehow a lot more fun. Rather than feeling discouraged and quitting the game after a few tries, my need to help Dot, the novelty of the game mechanics, and my burning need to see what the boss fights would be like drove me to keep going. The inclusion of women as the protagonists also played a part in how determined I was to make it through the game. Although Pixel Ripped 1989 banks on the nostalgia of an era from which female gamers are often erased entirely, it pulls those women back into the light through Nicola and makes women the heroes of the story.

The game is designed to immerse you in a reimagining of the 1980s, with the synthetic music, wood paneling, and trippy neon aesthetic to match. The sidescroller portion of the game is clearly an homage to a time before 3D graphics were so widely used, while the juxtaposition of the 3D graphics and VR effects against the pixelated sidescroller are a great way of showing how far we’ve come since. The end product feels like it came less from someone hopelessly stuck in the nostalgia of the 1980s and more like the team remembers the good of the 80s, while acknowledging where improvements have been made and should be made still.

Pixel Ripped 1989 somehow hit me right in the nostalgia for an era that I wasn’t even alive to see, and gave me a newfound appreciation for both the sidescroller and VR mediums, even after my apprehension at trying out a game that employs both together. It’s is an excellent example of the ways VR can be used to enhance a gameplay experience, and how it’s possible to create an homage to a time period that still manages to improve on it.

Fun fact: I finally went out and tried playing a Castlevania game after I was finished with this game, and loved it.

]]>It’s no surprise that a site full of writers has a fair number of folks participating in National Novel Writing Month, but that got us—more specifically, it got Tia Kalla and Zainabb Hull—thinking about gamification and setting our own challenges.

Gaming is comprised of challenges big and small, from individual enemy encounters to executing the perfect raid in an MMORPG to finally getting your D&D group together. But what about the challenges we make for ourselves? Can we gamify gaming itself?

Turns out, we can.

What do you think of gamification? Does it work for you?

Nola Pfau: As a person who relies on self-imposed systems to get through some of the most basic tasks of my day, I don’t think I could play video games without gamifying them. It’s just such a necessary part of how I interact with the world.

E. Forney: Gamification is a really useful skill for very monotonous tasks, I find. Even as a kid, when I was coloring in a picture, I would imagine I was herding a group of little germs: color the outside first, creating a ring so they can’t get out, and then destroying them by coloring over them. I’ve gamified making copies of receipts in an admin position by trying to see how fast I can push the copier buttons without making a mistake. The idle brain loves gamification!

Tia Kalla: As someone with ADHD and OCD-like symptoms, I very much relate to Forney’s example. Finding and executing patterns in games is very soothing to me. Someone in a stream I was watching the other day commented that the appeal of a turn-based JRPG is figuring out how to get through battles most efficiently, otherwise you’d just be playing a visual novel. Not sure about that last part, but I can definitely see the first!

Zainabb Hull: I love gamification for some of the reasons already mentioned. It massively appeals to my anxious and obsessive tendencies, and can really help me avoid rumination and procrastination in daily life. However, gamification can also run up against my perfectionism. I start to judge myself if I feel like I’m failing my goals, even the self-imposed ones!

Melissa Brinks: You know, despite writing this question, I’m not sure if I love gamification. I love making to-do lists and crossing things off, and a few years ago I was a heavy user of Habitica because it was nice to have rewards (which I could then spend on real-life rewards) for tasks I finished. But I don’t know if I gamify as much as I create systems and use them—does that count?

When you’re playing games, do you tend to set your own challenges? Are you a big collector of items?

Nola: Yes! In fact, with most games I notably will skip finishing the game’s actual plot in order to just run around collecting things. I suspect that’s a large part of why I’ve stuck with the Assassin’s Creed franchise; I don’t really care about the stories or characters, I just want to run around the map on a scavenger hunt.

Emily: Oh yeah. I love playing and replaying old-school third person platformers like Ratchet & Clank and Spyro the Dragon and Crash Bandicoot: Warped, mostly because as much as I like following the plots of these games, I am more than a little addicted to collecting all the collectables. Gems and eggs, precursor orbs, crystals and relics, platinum bolts—you name it, I’m after them. While I’m nowhere near even remotely considering myself a speedrunner, I’ve gotten to the point where I can 100 percent Jak and Daxter: The Precursor Legacy in under a day. The game-within-a-game there, for me, is seeing how quickly I can collect all the things. (But only inasmuch as I’m competing with myself.)

Forney: I’m not all about 100 percenting everything, but I do love to collect items, even when they aren’t useful to the game. I remember playing Ty the Tasmanian Tiger and being so excited to find out that there were translucent items and a boomerang upgrade you could get to find them, hot/cold style. I also found all 900 Koroks in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. I was so excited to finally be able to climb to places like Hyrule Castle, which I so desperately wanted to scale in previous games like Twilight Princess. And then there was an adorable woodland critter up there! Instantly hooked. I found about 700 before I started using the mask upgrade to help with the last 200 or so who were still hiding. I actually got a tattoo in honor of finding them all!

Tia: I’m a failed 100 percenter, lol. I usually will make an effort to 100 percent a game if it doesn’t get tedious. And yes, I have caught them all—multiple times. I even like playing idle games, which are generally just watching numbers tick up and making achievements. This is also why I’ve never beaten Final Fantasy VI.

There’s actually a psychological thing behind why collecting and completing achievements makes us satisfied (which is why people can get so easily addicted to gacha games, for example). I think also part of it is modern society—it’s hard to find a job where you feel like you make an impact, it’s difficult to feel like you’re actually making a dent in that mortgage, but naming all the dogs in Tales of Symphonia is a tangible and achievable goal.

Zainabb: These days, the goals I set myself tend to be a lot looser and more fluid than they were when I was a teen. For example, when playing JRPGs, I always try to level up between sections of the story to make sure I’m not too underpowered in the next boss fight! When I was younger, I would set myself specific levels to reach. Now, I’m playing Ni No Kuni, the first JRPG I’ve played in years, and I still try to level up between sections but I won’t set myself a specific level. Of course, as an adult, I have less time to spend with games so I focus more on finding a natural flow that leaves me feeling satisfied with my gaming session. But it’s also very much a mental shift, to avoid feeling trapped by arbitrary challenges and collection missions, which appeal deeply to me!

Melissa: I don’t set my own challenges so much as I create systems. I wrote about this a bit in my review of Cook, Serve, Delicious! 2!!, actually. I get a lot of satisfaction from creating a prioritized list and executing it flawlessly, which is why games like that are so much fun for me. But when it comes to setting challenges or collecting things, I tend to fail unless there’s a reward beyond satisfaction. Namely, unless I’m going to get more story for it, I’ll almost never spend time collecting things. The Koroks in Breath of the Wild are almost an exception because I like the little “Ya-ha-ha!” sound, but I never actively tried to find them all—I just stumbled upon them in my quest to explore the world. Like Zainabb, I look for the things that I enjoy and flow through those.

Are you an achievement hunter? If so, why do you like it? If not, why not?

Nola: Only in so much as those achievements are not time-attack, score, or PVP based. I don’t care about playing the game the best. I only care about exploring, finding stuff.

Emily: Funnily enough, as much as I like collecting and gamifying, I’m not really an achievement hunter per se. I’m not really in it for the external validation. The only game I went out of my way to collect all the achievements for was Dream Daddy, and even then, it was more because I wanted to see all the permutations of steamy endings and cute dadly feelings than because I wanted the approval of having seen them all.

Forney: Achievements are fun. It’s like marking off a to-do list. I play on gpx.plus (kind of like a community clicker game for hatching and raising Pokémon). I recently completed all their gym badge achievements, which involved maxing out Pokémon levels mostly. However, I don’t need to get all the achievements—if I see something will take a ton of time or money or energy, it falls off my radar.

Tia: Depends on the achievement. I like them for fun side things that you might not do normally, but that don’t get ridiculous. Pokémon Black/White 2 and Animal Crossing: New Leaf had a bunch of different ones that encouraged me to “grind” on activities I didn’t do as much.

Zainabb: For me, achievements tie in with the general concept of gamification and collection challenges. Earning an achievement is kind of like ticking off a smaller item on your to-do list, rather than the big goal. Maybe you haven’t finished the game yet, but you can collect all the shiny things or hit some significant points in the narrative. It can also help us to feel like we’re really making the most of a game.

I think the psychological and addictive aspect of achieving that Tia mentioned is really relevant to my experience with games. I used to be very anal about collecting Trophies and getting 100 percent completion rates. A few years back, I got seriously into the Lego series, partly because they’re great titles for collecting every achievement. You just need a walkthrough guide and some time, and you can collect every hidden treasure and character, all whilst spending quality time with one of your favourite franchises. About a third of the way through Lego The Lord of the Rings, though, trying to get 100 percent felt claustrophobic and I would get stressed about any time spent not playing the game. I had to swear off the Lego series (after I got all my achievements for Lego LOTR, of course…). While I still feel that ping of warm accomplishment any time a Trophy pops, nowadays I try to focus more on the game moment that I’m in and how I’m feeling with the game, rather than thinking about hitting milestones, making progress, or earning achievements.

Melissa: Generally, I’m not an achievement hunter—as others have mentioned, a lot of them are collection-based or require that you play in ways I don’t like. That said, if I unlock almost every achievement just because of the way I naturally play, I do suddenly become far more interested in unlocking them all. Two out of fifty achievements naturally unlocked won’t spur me to do the rest, but 12 out of 15 might. The closer I am to unlocking them all, the more likely I am to try—but that said, I don’t think I’ve ever unlocked every achievement in any game because I am also extremely lazy.

What about when it comes to multiplayer games and tabletop games? What kinds of constraints and challenges do you place on yourself in those environments?

Nola: It may shock you to learn, based on my prior answers, that I do not like competitive play. I like cooperative stuff! I like working with a group, and supporting that group, so when I engage in multiplayer activities that’s the frame I do so with; I look at a group and consider what I can offer to it. I like the shared sense of victory in achieving a goal, and I like the feeling I get from knowing I was able to help these people I care about.

Emily: Besides my mostly single-person video gaming, a nontrivial number of hours in my week are dedicated to playing both short- and long-term indie tabletop RPG campaigns, in systems like Monsterhearts or Fiasco. (I’m also currently GMing a Waterworld-inspired campaign of Apocalypse World.) In those environments, where we’re all there to tell a story together, we have plenty of room to challenge ourselves. During character creation sessions, I always try to pick personality traits for my characters that don’t come naturally to me (like the awkward teen sasquatch I played in Monsterhearts, or the disillusioned cyber-gambler I’m playing in The Veil). It would be easy to just play the same type of character every time, but I enjoy the challenge of trying to tap into an unfamiliar character’s authentic feelings rather than assigning them my own.

Forney: I’m a big fan of trying new things in multiplayer games. In RPGs, I’ll try to switch up the types of characters I tend to play. Although I love being a magical Bard in any D&D campaign, behaving according to the strict morals of a Paladin or reacting to a situation rashly like a Barbarian might can be a neat experience too. With competitive board games, I also like trying different strategies, even if I don’t think they will be successful in terms of winning me the game. I find that, especially when you’re playing with someone who is very good at the game and probably going to beat you, being unpredictable or wacky is a fun way to switch it up. I’ve heard it said that chess masters actually have a harder time playing against amateurs sometimes because they don’t make predictable moves.

Tia: The only way I’ve ever enjoyed Halo is with the ruleset I refer to as “Fun with Rocket Launchers”—everybody has rocket launchers, everyone has infinite ammo. The chaos it creates, both with blowing up other people and trying not to blow yourself up does level the playing field just a bit, but also it just plays a lot different than your regular ruleset. There’s a lot of yelling and explosions, and who doesn’t love that?

I find that, especially when you’re playing with someone who is very good at the game and probably going to beat you, being unpredictable or wacky is a fun way to switch it up.

E. Forney

As for tabletop, every time I’ve played, I’ve done a different character type/class. It’s not so much a matter of stretching myself as it is just being bored of playing the same class with the same moves and rulesets. Again, that exploration aspect, but instead of poking through hallways and nooks, I’m poking through spell lists and alignments.

Zainabb: Hard agree with Nola: competitive games are not for me. I tend to get far too wound-up about winning and have earned some concerned looks from pals for the kind of rotten trash talk that comes out of my mouth. So when I’m playing with others, I’m mostly thinking about how to make a cooperative situation as enjoyable as possible for everyone involved. With me around, this usually includes chaos of the kind that Tia’s talking about (rocket launchers truly improve any virtual situation) and setting ourselves silly, arbitrary goals, like a D&D run where our subplot involves the characters conducting a food tour of the land.

Melissa: I know what I like to do: I like tanking. In multiplayer games, I want to hit things and make them hit me back instead of hitting other people. In tabletop games, I want things to hit things and make them hit me back instead of hitting other people. I will almost always choose a tank character if that’s an option, which is why I like introducing randomness. Mystery Heroes is my favorite Overwatch mode so I don’t just end up picking D.va every turn because I know I’m good at her. I actually enjoy a bit of randomness when rolling tabletop characters, because I can’t just say, “She’s big and strong!” I have to account for all the little concessions I have to make because of randomness or constraints. That kind of thing pushes me to play differently, and is ultimately how I end up having more fun—and if I want to go back to crushing my enemies, I can always try something else.

Nola: I’ve always wanted to do a playthrough of the original Final Fantasy with four white mages, but I haven’t gotten around to it. For RPGs with character creation mechanics, I definitely like making alternates for the sake of experimenting outside my main, sometimes it’s just fun to see what they can do, even if it’s not a playstyle I’d enjoy longterm. For some mobile games I work with a constraint in that I only do the daily repeating challenges, and avoid the other events. I actually prefer it that way; it keeps me from burning out on them.

Emily: Generally, I would say yes. The games that come to mind, for some reason, are Tony Hawk’s Underground and Underground 2. While the Pro Skater games were in the classic arcade style of collecting objects and gaining high scores, the Underground versions introduced (loosely-defined) narratives to the series. The Underground games were still objective-based, but more open-world, which meant that even though following the new narratives wasn’t as fun for me (because they were honestly pretty meh), I usually ended up trawling around in all the little nooks and crannies of each level searching for glitches or challenging myself to complete all the missions in a stage before moving on to the next city. So even though I didn’t love the Underground games, being completionist/challenge-motivated definitely made them more fun for me! I don’t know that every game requires additional constraints for me to enjoy them, but there are certainly a lot of games out there that I like more when I’m enforcing my own challenge modes.

Forney: I kind of dipped into this question with my previous response, but I definitely love starting with self-imposed constraints. I never finished my Nuzlocke run of Pokémon Crystal, but I thought playing that way made me much more observant of the different levels and areas. I had to know if I was on Route Whatever or not to qualify to get a new Pokémon, so it taught me more about which areas were connected. I feel like if you put player-characters on a map of Europe instead of a Pokémon region, I’d be a lot better at geography!

Tia: Self-imposed challenges are a great way to make old gameplay new again. My first Nuzlocke was on Alpha Sapphire, a game whose basic plot I had played twice before. If I end up getting Let’s Go, Pikachu!/Eevee!, I’ll probably do it again just to keep Kanto from boring the heck out of me.

I think that’s why randomizer romhacks have become so popular—there are games like Link to the Past and Super Metroid that people have played endlessly and know start to finish—every jump, every item location, every enemy. Randomizers make it so you don’t know what to expect, but you can still apply the basic skills and a good bit of the knowledge of the game to the playthrough. In my Pokémon Emerald randomizer runs for Extra Life, I was running into all sorts of out-of-place trainer Pokémon, mixed-up movesets, and team Pokémon I’d normally never consider or have access to, but I could still use my knowledge of moves, base stats, and type advantages to strategize.

Zainabb: I agree with Emily. For me, it depends on the game and the constraints. I’m not a hardcore gamer at all so I’ve never gotten into playthroughs on a higher difficulty or with additional constraints, like in some survival sims. Instead, I like constraints that make open worlds weirder; anything that offers up new opportunities or perspectives. I used to love telling stories in The Sims by limiting in-game resources or choosing very set paths for my characters. I also love the way that some players have used open-world RPGs like Skyrim to play very specific roles, like farmers, which is both absurd and charming.

Melissa: I also got into this with my last answer, but essentially: yes. Though I almost never follow through with challenges in video games, I do love how they make me look at things differently. I’ll discuss my favorite one below!

What is the best challenge (or outcome or experience that came from it) you’ve ever set in a game?

Melissa: During my Uncharted 4 playthrough, I was so aggravated with Drake that I started a photo album called, “Places Nathan Drake Could Have Kissed His Wife if He Wasn’t Being Such a Jackass.” It was silly and flippant, but it did make me look at the scenery differently—I wasn’t just appreciating them for pretty vistas, but for like, gorgeous potentially romantic postcards that were never realized. And when I go back through that photo album (as I do, occasionally), I see the game differently than if I’d only been focused on taking photos that looked cool, or photos that showed Drake being a badass, or photos that framed the scenery nicely without Drake in them.

Forney: The constraints I made for myself for finding all the Koroks in BotW made it a really enjoyable task. First, the Koroks are super cute and just tickle my fancy, so that’s fun no matter what for me. But also, the steps of finding them—find around 700 before using the mask, scan the map for likely places, try to cover every part of the map using the Hero’s Path update, etc. Toward the end, I did make use of internet guides just to reduce frustration. I decided the best way to do that was to pinpoint a place that seemed like a good Korok spot and then, before taking the time to travel there, looking up to see if I could confirm my hunch. That definitely saved me some time but didn’t detract from my accomplishment.

Emily: My brothers and I tend to do a lot of noodling around in games, trying to find glitches and strange outcomes. I think my favorite outcome from our noodling about was in Escape from Monkey Island, a point-and-click adventure game about pirates where you collect and combine various items to create solutions to puzzles. We would obsessively combine every item with every other item, until we discovered that by combining every prosthetic body part you found at Pegnose Pete’s Palace of Prostheses would create an item listed as the “Abomination of Nature” and prompt main character Guybrush Threepwood to yell, “It’s aliiiiiiiiiive!…That was exciting.” We early-2000s Durham children were delighted. And to think, we wouldn’t even have found this gem if we hadn’t challenged ourselves to combine all the things.

Tia: After setting up my mayor’s house with all my favorite sets in Animal Crossing: New Leaf, I got inspired by the creative takes on the internet and decided to do something a bit different for the rest. So my other characters’ houses are a community center, a mini-mall, and a commercial office-ish space. I’m quite proud of my karaoke room, my library, and my makerspace. (Does anyone have a Lottie amiibo? I need a drafting table!)

Zainabb: My favourite challenge was when my brother and I played a very long round of TimeSplitters Future Perfect, pitting ourselves against an entire squad of computer-controlled enemies on the hardest difficulty setting and with one-shot kills. I think our win condition was to get 100 kills, and we must have played that match for two or three hours. We laughed, we died (a lot), and we learned the Venice map inside and out. It’s not the most extreme challenge I’ve ever set but it was definitely the most fun. It was the first time I felt that unique sense of bonding and reward that comes with teaming up with your pals against overpowered machine enemies and just not taking a game too seriously.